I has officially been a month since we departed the US and landed ourselves back in Durban. To be honest, it feels like we've been back just a few days in so many ways. In other ways, it feels like a year. We can barely remember the smell of Dunn Brother's Coffee or the bird sounds that are so different from the sounds here. The month has gone by quickly because we feel like we have made such little progress in some of our biggest life and ministry goals here. We are back into the swing of things, and yet it feels like we have accomplished little.
Well, at least finally the house feels like home again and no longer looks SO BARE (a feeling, we think, that resulted from spending time in lots of very full American houses). The intense feelings of being torn from the ones you love best and who love you best have faded into a dull ache. We have, actually, fully re-established ourselves here. It has just taken time we did not expect it too.
I thought I would include a description of the bird sound so wake up to in the morning. We have a group of 7 Hadedas (pronounced Haw-de-daw) that nest in our neighbor's tree. I call them the little old grumpy men.
In Johannesburg, and on the beaches and savannas of southern Africa, it is the hadeda ibis, not the rooster, whose song, if it can be called that, announces morning. Har-har-har, he calls. Loud, raucous, guttural, the hadeda’s cacophonous call sounds like drunk men laughing. Har-har-ha-de-da.
Imagine a middle-aged man, grumpy and barrel-chested. He drinks too much, yells too often, laughs a lot but is quick to anger. Now. put feathers on him and stick him in a tree. Give him avian vision, a long curved bill, and a Red Sox fan’s hoarse yawp—and hello, hadeda
Anthony Schneider
